The goal of the Startup Manifesto is to change the mindset of the whole country of Belgium towards entrepreneurship. We want to create 10.000 new startups and 100.000 new jobs in Belgium in less than five years.
Starting a company is already hard enough, we should remove all other hurdles that hurt the creation of companies, jobs, and economic growth.
We can reach these goals by advocating and driving change in legislation, taxation, education and most importantly in the hearts and minds of everyone who cares about entrepreneurship For the list of proposals check the Belgian Startup Manifesto.
Every single person that is either a national of Belgium, that lives or works in Belgium.
The Belgian Startup Manifesto is intended for all the people that care about Belgium and that want to improve the country via its startups. If you believe that entrepreneurship should be encouraged and stimulated, then the manifesto is also for you.
It all started with a simple tweet. Then Xavier picked up the torch and so did Karen, Bart, Robin and many others. As soon as Xavier started working on it he sent out a call for ideas together with Karen using the hashtag #BeStartupManifesto and more than 100 ideas where shared in social media, via email, talks… After this, a group of committed entrepreneurs got together to curate all these ideas, synthesizing, ordering, prioritizing… The first version of the manifesto was presented on March 12 2015 at the Tech Startup Day, just one month after the initial tweet that started it all.
This has been a really fast paced work. The first version has been drafted in English as it is the common language of the curators. Versions in other languages will come as the community submits them.
How did you come up with 10,000 new startups and 100,000 new jobs?
That wasn’t hard: we picked 800, then we multiplied it by 3.5, then we added 533 and we multiplied it all by 3.
That’s how we got to 10,000. Then we figured that each startup would have eventually on average 10 people.
This is a distributed effort with many members of the community involved at different levels. Expect this link to change. We have included the preferred languages of each person by their name, with a link to their profile and their Twitter account. These are the people that are available for questions, suggestions and comment:
This Manifesto could not have been without the help of a lot of people that contributed their ideas and support through the #BEStartupManifesto (we call this the waffletag). Among them we would like to highlight: